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I’m sure the People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals had the best intentions, but I doubt the ads will convince many people to go vegan — at least besides those who are already on the verge of ditching meat anyway.

The campaign may be controversial and ineffective because it activates something that scientists call the “meat paradox” — most of us love animals, but most of us love meat, too. Canadians own, and most likely love, 5.9 million dogs and 7.9 million cats, and yet, as a nation, kill over 711 million chickens a year.

We know that the process of turning cows or chickens into steaks and fried wings is not all rainbows. This causes us to experience cognitive dissonance — an unpleasant state which arrises when our behaviours and values clash.

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Cognitive dissonance is nasty: it’s all about guilt and discomfort. We’d rather avoid it, so we’ve developed many techniques to reduce it, including dissociation, denial of animal mind, avoidance (“I can’t do anything about it”), and pro-meat justifications (meat is natural, everybody eats it, and so on).

At first, when faced with PETA’s messages, you may find yourself bristling up: why should I listen to these people? That’s denial — a similar cognitive reducing strategy to the one commonly implemented by smokers. Research shows that the more cigarettes a person puffs a day, the more they will resist the reports linking tobacco and lung cancer.

Another study found that the mechanism applies to food, too: among people who received information on the risks of getting food poisoning from beef, those who had just dined on the meat were more likely to discredit the news than those who had salmon.

The second common strategy to dampen cognitive dissonance is to deny the animal has a mind in the first place. Experiments conducted in Australia have, in a way, tested the efficacy of PETA’s message.

Over 100 meat eaters were asked to rate the smarts of cows and sheep, and then later, in a supposedly unrelated “consumer behaviour study,” offered a snack: either roast beef, lamb, or apples. But before they could dig into the food they had to once again give their opinion on the smarts of cows and sheep.

The results showed that those who were just about to eat meat suddenly lowered their opinion of farm animals, changing their own previous assessments.

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That suggests that even if PETA’s posters could make someone think better of a calf or a chicken for a few minutes, the effects would likely disappear once the next burger entered the scene.

To convince people to reduce meat consumption — something I believe is indeed necessary for the sake of our overheated planet — we need positive messages that don’t activate cognitive dissonance.

I could imagine a campaign with posters featuring mouth-watering foods saying something along the lines: “Try me — I’m vegan.” Or ads portraying handsome and muscular athletes, preferably famous, with a simple tag line — “XY is vegan” (there were campaigns like this already, by the way).

Another idea would be to promote weight-loss effects of plant-based diets — studies show that vegans and vegetarians tend to shed unwanted pounds and have lower BMIs than omnivores.

Focusing on health or selfish beauty goals may seem to some like a betrayal of the ethical side of the problem. Curiously, though, once people adopt plant-based diets and no longer experience cognitive dissonance, they often start looking deeper into the issues of animal rights — no matter their initial motivation.

But if the goal here is to reduce our addiction to meat as much and as quickly as possible, such an ethics-heavy debate is not the place to start.

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